CRAWLING BORDER

11 December 2015—20 January 2016

On December 11, at 6 pm, IZOLYATSIA and participants of the Georgian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial open the exhibition CRAWLING BORDER.

Challenges that Georgia is facing today apply to Ukraine as well. Taking this into account, and given that the Georgian pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2015 and IZOLYATSIA’s guerilla action #onvacation encourage reflections on similar topics like occupation and understatement, the foundation shares its platform to provoke further critical thinking and open dialog. Apart from the exhibition itself, the project will feature meetings with curators and artists, as well as lectures and discussions.

CRAWLING BORDER is the reality, which Georgia and other post-Soviet countries are confronted with and which owes its existence to the country’s geopolitical position. Georgia’s pavilion aims to highlight this reality to a maximum extent. It serves as a political and social message bringing a kind of dissonance into the current political landscape of Europe.

The exhibition will be held in Kyiv, 8 Naberezhno-Luhova Street, Second Floor.

The project’s main concept is a narrative of events structured as a DNA chain analogy, which exists in its usual environment and often remains unnoticed before it is impacted by provoking external factors. Crawling border is primarily associated with the drawing of borders in a stealthy manner, and the personal tragedy of many people behind it often escapes our attention.

Visitors to the exhibition can take as close a look as possible at the existing reality. In a mirrored room they will be able to put themselves in the place of those who had to come through the ordeal. The Kunstkamera – an observatory of memories is a place, which, like the subconscious, contains layers of fragments from the past: personal histories and memories, and faces of children living in the territories adjacent to the occupation line – faces, which have already become a blur and continue to be disregarded. The installation eventually takes on an ironic aspect and is transformed into a puzzle – a puzzle a clue to which is discovered only in the last cell, which symbolizes the reality eternally and purposelessly turning around in a circle. Visitors finding themselves locked within the construction feel discomfort and out of tune with their surroundings, which serves the goal of bringing them closer to the situation in Georgia and in other countries as well.